S. Korea Presidential Nominee Park Seeks to Meet North’s Kim

By Sangwon Yoon -
Nov 5, 2012

South Korea ruling party presidential
nominee Park Geun Hye said she wants to meet North Korean leader
Kim Jong Un to improve relations if she wins next month’s
election.

“I am willing to meet the leader of North Korea for the
advancement of inter-Korean relations,” Park said today at a
televised press briefing in Seoul to announce her foreign
affairs and national security policy pledges.

Park, whose mother was killed in 1974 during a North Korean
assassination attempt on her father when he led South Korea,
pledged to reverse outgoing President Lee Myung Bak’s hard-line
stance against Kim’s regime. North Korea two days ago blasted
the ruling New Frontier Party and said ties would worsen if she
is elected.

The 60-year-old Park is seeking to become the first female
leader of Asia’s fourth-largest economy in the Dec. 19 vote. She
is outpolling two challengers in her bid to overcome Lee’s
plummeting approval ratings and revive a party hurt by scandals
by promising to address a widening income gap and expand welfare
spending.

Today, Park called for installing offices in Seoul and
North Korea’s capital of Pyongyang to improve communication and
said she would form a crisis management bureau to centralize
control over national security, diplomacy and unification
issues. She said she would help North Korea join global
financial and trade organizations, and pledged assistance in
promoting foreign investment into the totalitarian state.

‘Source of Disasters’

North Korea’s Secretariat of the Committee for the Peaceful
Reunification blasted the NFP as “a source of disasters of the
nation and the root cause of all misfortunes,” in a Nov. 3
statement carried by the official Korean Central News Agency.
Relations will be “worse then what they were during the Lee
regime” if Park is elected, according to the statement.

Park served as acting first lady after her mother was
killed in a North Korean assassination attempt on her father
Park Chung Hee. The elder Park was South Korea’s longest-serving
military ruler until he was killed by his deputy and
intelligence chief in 1979, ending an 18-year dictatorship.

Moon and Ahn will meet tomorrow to discuss joining forces
to secure an opposition victory next month, Ahn’s spokeswoman
Chung Yeon Soon said in a text message. Ahn suggested a meeting
while giving a lecture today at Chonnam National University in
Gwangju, a city about 300 kilometers (186 miles) south of Seoul,
Chung said.